3 Essential Tips to Running Your Own Blog Tour [Updated]
As an author, it is important to get the word out about your book. Often, authors, together with their publisher or on their own, will set up a book tour in which they visit bookstores across a specific region or country.
During these visits, authors can meet their fans, sign books, and socialize with bookstore owners, and sometimes socialize with other important figures in the writing industry.
By contrast, a blog tour is essentially a virtual book tour.
Rather than going from town to town, bookstore to bookstore, the author goes from blog to blog, promoting her book. Tour activities can range from giveaways to guest articles to Q&As. Unlike an in-person book tour, a blog tour allows you, the author, to work within your schedule, from the comfort of your home, and within the constraints of your everyday life. You may be wondering why you should run a blog tour. Well, here are just a few of the benefits:
- Introduction to new, and therefore more, readers
- Get reviews
- Get more sales
- Show off your expertise, especially if your book is a how-to book or business related
- Increase your mailing list
Your own blog tour
Do any of these benefits sound appealing to you? As an author, they should! Here are 3 essential tips to running your own blog tour:
- Establish a start and end date. While you may think it would be beneficial to run your blog tour indefinitely, establishing a start and end date will help you set marketing goals. For example, to run an intense, full-on promotion, I recommend 30 stops in 30-45 days. By setting up dates, you can build up the excitement by getting your friends, family and fans involved in spreading the word.
- Identify your target audience. It is critical for you to know who you are targeting your book toward. Knowing this information will give you a jump start to figuring out which blogs you should be submitting your blog requests to. For example, if you wrote a children’s book about dogs, submitting a blog tour request to someone who runs a Fortune 500, business oriented blog will not be an ideal use of time or effort. Not only should you target book bloggers, but you should target bloggers who write about your subject matter.
- Know your time schedule/expectations. Just because you are organizing a blog tour doesn’t mean you have to write a 500-700 word article for each stop. Whether you have time to commit to writing an article per stop, or your busy life limits you to a Q&A session per stop, this is YOUR blog tour and you have to make it work with your life schedule.
If you are interested in learning more about how to run your own blog tour for your book, or how to run blog tours for others, please check out my course, “How to Run a Successful Blog Tour for Authors.” Included in my course are 29 informational videos, supplemented by checklists and templates to walk you, step-by-step, through setting up a blog tour. With a 5-Star rating from previous students, lifetime access to the course, and a 30-Day Money Back Guarantee, this is an opportunity no author should ignore.
http://school.bethbarany.com/courses/how-to-run-a-successful-blog-tour-for-novelists.
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Click to tweet: How to Run a Successful Blog Tour teaches you everything you need to know to organize and run a blog tour for your book. (You can edit before sending.)Some students have said:
“How to Run a Successful Blog Tour teaches you everything you need to know to organize and run a blog tour for your book. Even though I already knew a bit about blog tours when I started the course, the instructor went into many details that I wouldn’t have considered (and has probably saved me some grief, as a result!)…” — Sarah Ettritch
“Beth breaks info down, and delivers it in bite size chunks. She starts at the beginning, with the basics, and builds a foundation by having you answer questions like “Why do you want to do a book tour,” and “What do you expect to get out of it,” so you are clear of your own expectations…” — Cyndee Paulsen-Heer
” ‘How to Run a Successful Blog Tour for Authors’ makes the intimidating task of putting together a blog tour seem easy! The course is informative and easy to understand due in large part to Beth Barany’s organizational skills, professional knowledge, real experiences, and pleasant video presence…” — Vonnie Winslow Crist
ABOUT THE AUTHOR/INSTRUCTOR
Award-winning author of “Henrietta the Dragon Slayer,” Beth Barany is a marketing advisor for writers and publishers. She’s run over a dozen marketing campaigns for authors and small publishers, including blog tours, Amazon Bestseller campaigns and social media campaigns. If you liked this content, please subscribe to this blog, or sign up via the email subscription.
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